The evidence grows stronger daily that a defining characteristic of modern repuglicans is that they fervently believe things that are simply not true.
QOTD (via brownsox at DKOS) U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt: "I guess you can't be Franklin Roosevelt if you don't create a depression."
Benen on THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING... At this point, I kind of hope South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) continues to strive for the national spotlight. The governor, who appears to be mad as a hatter, keeps saying crazy things that make for fun blog posts. ... The easiest way to make this guy appear foolish is to hand him a microphone and get out of the way.
QOTD2, John Cole: I’m not even going to pretend to understand what is going on, but I will say this- if I owned 80% of something, and every damned month it cost me a metric ton of money I did not have, it would not be too long before I drove that something off a cliff, hit it in the back of the head with a shovel, or shot it multiple times at close range. Why can’t we shoot AIG and bury it in the backyard?
Paranoid QOTD3, CNBC’s Rick Santelli on G. Gordan Liddy talk show (via Think Progress):
SANTELLI: He started that press conference saying, “I don’t know where he lives, I don’t know where his house is.” This is the Press Secretary of the White House. Is that the kind of thing we want? Is that —
LIDDY: It’s a veiled threat.
SANTELLI: It really is. […] I don’t really want to be a spokesman, but I really am very proud of a) the response I’m getting, which is overwhelmingly positive, and b) discourse, that is debate. That if the pressure and the heat I’m taking from the White House – the fact my kids are nervous to go to school – I can take that, okay.
Waldman: Rove due before HJC today
No word yet on whether he's shown up, though he's expected this time. It's just that no one expects he'll actually testify fully or truthfully.What they'll do about it if he doesn't, I have no idea.
UPDATE: Well, I hope somebody has some idea, because I hear Rove didn't even show.
Daily Kos' DemfromCT on Operation Unified Lemming: The GOP announced today that the party as a whole would be heading off the political cliff later this year.
Benen on REMOVING ALL DOUBT.... about:
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ken.) won re-election despite odd and erratic personal behavior. Now, in advance of another re-election fight, Bunning is acting strangely again. ... "U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning predicted over the weekend that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would likely be dead from pancreatic cancer within nine months. During a wide-ranging 30-minute speech on Saturday at the Hardin County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner, Bunning said he supports conservative judges "and that's going to be in place very shortly because Ruth Bader Ginsburg … has cancer.""
...And here I thought Bill Frist was the only Republican comfortable making medical diagnoses from afar.
There are a few angles to this. First, Bunning -- whose background is in professional baseball, not medicine -- doesn't really know what he's talking about.
Ezra Klein on WHY HARRY REID DOESN'T FORCE REPUBLICANS TO FILIBUSTER.
One of the most common assignment desks is recent weeks has been on the filibuster: Why, you ask, doesn't Reid just make the GOP talk all night? Ryan Grim looked into this and obtained a memo Reid's office wrote on the Senate rules. The problem, Reid's people concluded, is that the Republicans wouldn't have to talk. And the Senate parliamentarians agree.
...
But delay in the Senate, Grim finds, doesn't require a long speech. It requires only one Republican to be president, and he or she doesn't need to say anything in front of the cameras at all. Every time the Democrats tried to vote, the Republican would simply have to say "I suggest the absence of a quorum." At that point, says Grim, "the presiding officer would then be required to call the roll. When that finished, the Senator could again notice the absence of a quorum and start the process all over. At no point would the obstructing Republican be required to defend his position, read from the phone book or any of the other things people associate with the Hollywood version of a filibuster."
- Commenter tomtom | February 23, 2009 1:03 PM: So whay is it that we don't want to force a filibuster?Wouldn't endless quorum calls look just as obstructive as reading from the phone book?Aren't the atmospherics even better for the Democrats? The Republicans won't look like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith goes to Washington. They'll look like what they are, a minority using a parliamentary maneuver to avoid an up or down vote on popular legislation, shutting down the government in the process.Isn't that a confrontation we would win? The story Kevin tells doesn't hang together. Am I missing something?
- Kos on The point of making them filibuster.
atrios: on Missing the Point
CNBC guy just asked why Obama didn't embrace PayGo before passing the stimulus package.
Our discourse is so stupid.
Benen on THE SHOCKING MARSH-MOUSE TRUTH....
The New York Times had an item yesterday, describing the Republican Party's vision of a "loyal opposition." ... "Mr. Gingrich sees the stimulus bill as his party's ticket to a revival in 2010," the NYT's Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote, "as Republicans decry what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh-mouse preservation."The Times neglected to mention, of course, that there was no pork-barrel spending for marsh-mouse preservation. It's a Republican talking point that isn't true. Stolberg simply passed this along as if it were fact. It's not.
This comes up quite a bit. MSNBC's "Morning Joe" has been repeating the marsh-mouse claim quite a bit lately, and to its credit, the show invited PolitiFact.com's Bill Adair on to the show this morning to scrutinize the story.
...But what I found most interesting about this wasn't just the fact-checking, which was welcome, but the response from the "Morning Joe" crew, which was flabbergasted when confronted with reality. Take a listen around the 45-second mark, and note the amazement and incredulity when Adair started to explain why this bogus talking point isn't grounded in reality.
- as atrios said: I've found journalists, and those like Joe who pretend to play them on teevee, have this weird belief that sources won't lie to them because if they do they'll reveal them as liars to the world and that would so totally destroy them. But of course they never actually do that. So they get lied to.
- I sent Morning Joe the following note:
This morning, at the tail end of your segment where you became aware that your show had flogged lies about the supposed Pelosi field mouse project, Mika said she still didn't think the work should be in the bill, because it's trying to stop a catastrophe.
I'm going to say this very slowly in the hopes you all will understand. At its core, "the catastrophe" is the loss of demand in our economy. The stimulus bill is designed to stimulate demand by creating new jobs and by protecting existing jobs.
Wetland restoration is a labor intensive activity. It creates jobs both directly on each site and in design, but also in associated businesses like landscape nurseries and heavy equipment rental and sales.
When you are in a hole, you should stop digging if you ever want to get out. You folks keep demonstrating that you don't know very much - and Mika put an exclamation point on that today.
Say what? This is a fascinating look from Balloon Juice at how the media absorbs and transmits republican talking points.
Benen on another RW LIE that JUST WON'T GO AWAY....
Once a claim makes its way onto the approved list of Official Republican Talking Points, it's there to stay. Even after a claim has been exposed as completely false -- sometimes, especially after it's been proven false -- GOP figures will just keep repeating it.
When it comes to the stimulus package, we have a few too many examples to choose from.
...
But this one is especially egregious, and not just because there is no $8 billion for light rail between L.A. and Vegas.
...So, in this case, McCain is not only lying, he's confused about the subject on which he's lying. He then insists, "Everybody knows that," as if those who accept reality are somehow ignorant.
It's a helpful reminder of why policy debates with congressional Republicans don't usually go well.
From C&L: 'Fiscal Responsibility' Theme at Today's White House Economic Summit
Dave N.: Obama's framing at the opening speech of the summit was superb:
Think Progress - Obama Hits GOP Governors Rejecting Stimulus Funds: There’ll Be ‘Ample Time For Campaigns Down The Road’Obama: In the end, however, if we want to rebuild our economy and restore discipline and honesty to our budget, we will need to change the way we do business here in Washington. We're not going to be able to fall back into the same old habits, and make the same inexcusable mistakes: The repeated failure to act as our economy spiraled deeper into crisis. The casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks. The costly overruns, the fraud and abuse, the endless excuses. This is exactly what the American people rejected when they went to the polls. They sent us here to usher in a new era of responsibility in Washington, to start living within our means again, and being straight with them about where their tax dollars are going, and empowering them with all the information they need to hold all of us, their representatives, accountable.
This morning, President Obama addressed members of the National Governors Association, focusing his remarks on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. During the speech, Obama specifically took aim at the GOP governors who have said that they will reject some of the package’s funding,
......OBAMA: "I just want us to not lose perspective of the fact that most of the things that have been the topic of argument over the last several days amount to a fraction of the overall stimulus package. This sometimes gets lost in the cable chatter. […]
And so, if we agree on 90 percent of this stuff, and we’re spending all our time on television arguing about 1, 2, 3 percent of the spending in this thing, and somehow it’s being characterized in broad brush as wasteful spending, that starts sounding more like politics. And that’s what right now we don’t have time to do. […]
What I don’t want us to do, though, is to just get caught up in the same old stuff that inhibits us from acting effectively and in concert. There’s going to be ample time for campaigns down the road."
The White House pool report noted that during his comments about the “cable chatter,” Obama looked directly “towards Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, who were to his right.”
What would we do without Krugman out there schooling RW pundits on economics?
Hilarious. Daily Kos' Devilstower says One of These Things is Fiscally Irresponsible
BarbinMD says the DCCC is Targeting Twelve Republicans
Here's an example of the automated calls that will be running:
Hello, I’m calling on behalf of House Democrats with an important message about the economy.
Did you know Congressman Thad McCotter voted against President Obama’s economic recovery plan, endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? McCotter’s empty rhetoric can’t hide that he voted to raise the AMT tax on 22 million middle class Americans and against the largest tax cut in history.
Call McCotter at 734-632-0314 to ask why he voted to raise taxes on middle class families.
Check out Recovery For America to learn more.
Yglesias: Newt Gingrich Leading Insane Conservative Effort to Close Deficit By Reducing Revenues
... The reporters on the piece, Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane, might have observed that a deficit is, by definition, a shortfall between revenue and spending. Thus, it’s extremely difficult to envision circumstances under which “additional tax cuts” would prevent the deficit from ballooning. As this handy chart indicates, ...
Actual headline from Yahoo News (h/t atrios): Citigroup's Clever Plan to Screw Taxpayers Again
Josh Marshall on why Nationalization Very Scary :
Over at US News, Rick Newman has an article on why bank nationalization is allegedly such a scary prospect. ... But one point in Newman's list stuck out at me -- that nationalization would 'vaporize' a lot of wealth. ... So yes, it's scary how many people could 'lose a bundle', unless you come to grips with the fact that that bundle has already been lost and that the only thing preventing them from coming to grips with that fact is the assumption that the taxpayers will come in and make all those folks whole. ... As Joe Stiglitz says (and many other do too) it really is a zero sum. How much do the investors pay for and how much do the taxpayers pay for?
Benen on Obama IN SEARCH OF AN HONEST DEBATE....
He wasn't calling out Jindal, Sanford, and Barbour specifically, but the message was hard to miss. Obama wants to engage in an "honest debate" -- he used the phrase a few times this morning -- and some Republicans with their sights on 2012 aren't offering one.
Daily Kos' Meteor Blades on Hilda Solis Confirmation Vote Tuesday
One more step remains for Hilda Solis to become the nation's 25th Secretary of Labor, the seventh woman to hold that position. And that's supposed to happen on Tuesday. Or rather, as rules expert David Waldman aka Kagro X would say, two steps. A vote to cut off debate, which takes 60 Senators, and another to confirm her in the post.
...
Solis's appointment matters. As pointed out by several commentators, she is reminiscent of Frances Perkins, who served as Secretary of Labor throughout FDR's four terms, the first woman in any Cabinet post, and a liberal before that term meant what it does today. Historians generally agree that she persuaded Roosevelt to push some of the most important New Deal legislation.
